The Journal piece notes that e-book prices, particularly for some best-selling and popular titles, are in many cases actually higher than prices for the comparable print version. For example, author Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants” costs $18.99 as an e-book and sells on Amazon as a paperback for $16.50. One New Yorker says he is buying fewer e-books because of the higher prices publishers are charging for them, telling the Journal:

It’s hard to justify the purchase of e-books that are priced at $10 to $15 when you can buy the real book on Amazon used for $2 or $3

Publishers are indulging in wishful thinking

And how do publishers justify doing this? Among other things, they claim that consumers are actually willing to pay more for the e-book version of a novel because of the convenience and other features that they get with an electronic edition — the ability to search, make highlights, and so on. A senior vice-president at Hachette Digital, a unit of one of the world’s largest publishing firms, tells the Journal that she believes “there has been a change in the understanding of the value of a digital book,” and that readers see the added value and are willing to pay extra for it.

This sounds like a giant case of wishful thinking, and there is mounting evidence to indicate it is just that. While it’s true that e-book sales continue to increase, that’s more likely due to the mainstream adoption of readers like the Kindle and the iPad than it is any acceptance of higher e-book prices. The WSJ piece also quotes publishing industry sources as saying they are seeing consumer resistance to e-book prices in the $10 to $15 range, and a company that tracks e-book piracy notes that the rate with which books are being scanned and uploaded to file-sharing sites is also increasing exponentially.

The irony in this approach, as the WSJ story points out, is that the “agency model” that the major publishers signed with Apple actually results in less money from many titles. In the past, Amazon would give publishers a fixed price for both the printed and the electronic version of a book, and then any discounting on the e-book version would come out of Amazon’s pocket. But under the agency model, publishers get 70 percent of the retail price, which for some titles means they wind up with less revenue.

On top of that, the Big Six publishing firms are currently embroiled in a federal antitrust investigation over the agency model, based on allegations that the deal with Apple represented collusion and illegal price-fixing and is therefore anti-competitive. Winning the ability to set prices for e-books instead of letting Amazon do so may have felt like a victory at the time, but it could turn out to be a hollow one.